Here are some papers my students came up with:

One wrote a series of songs, with words and music, in various of the styles we had been studying, recorded them and turned in a 10-page explanatory paper to boot. He got the highest grade.

Another interviewed native informants to see what traditional proverbs they knew and wrote a very interesting paper.

A third wrote about the Cuban décima, contrasting oral and written styles of the genre and making some good observations about gender.

Another dedicated her paper to the cultural resilience of Sephardic Jews, using examples taken from traditional proverbs.


Those were the four best, and there were a few more just below this level, with good ideas but not as clean an execution.